Selling Drugs in Eastern Europe: Psychopharmaceuticals and Advertising Abnormality

• In Event: Visual Culture in Late Socialism

Abstract

Historians of medicine have largely framed the twentieth century boom in prescriptions of psychopharmaceuticals – psychiatric drugs aimed at eliminating abnormal behaviour – as quintessentially connected to capitalism. The rise in sales of these “consumer goods” has consistently been linked to the pharmaceutical industry’s pursuit of new markets and increased profitability, especially in light of research indicating fairly low levels of success via drug treatment. Challenging this interpretation, however, is the fact that prescriptions of psychoactive medications also rose sharply across Communist Europe during this period, with East European firms synthesizing new medications to combat worry, sadness, and disordered thinking.

This paper analyzes the rise of psychopharmaceuticals across Eastern Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. Despite not facing the same pressure to create profits for shareholders, East European pharmaceutical houses promoted their products with the same vigour as their Western counterparts. Based on an analysis of Yugoslav, Czechoslovak, and East German pharmaceutical producers and their advertisements, the paper contributes to emerging historiographical discussions about advertising in the Communist context. It suggests that East European marketing techniques both attempted to replicate Western advertising trends and also forged new marketing strategies that reflected the unique socio-political conditions of their domestic markets. Ultimately, the paper argues that the study of psychopharmaceutical advertising provides fresh perspectives for approaching the question of how East European societies conceptualized abnormality and deviance.

Author

• Mat Savelli, McMaster University